New Features

Tim

The short announcement "The new ChartingKit [...] guarantees flexibility, advanced customization options and unique performance." doesn't reveal much information about the new features. Is there a more detailed information online? "The new architecture comes to serve the numerous requests for improvements in our existing RadChart control." What are these "numerous requests"? I hope some of mine will be satisfied, too! ;)

Thanks a lot for any information on this topic! Really looking forward to download and install Q3!
Keep up with the good work and have a good evening,
Tim.

Answer

Giuseppe

You can check the overview page here (apologize for the text layout, we will fix that for the official release alongside with polishing some of the content) but generally here are some of the most important highlights:

Performance: exceptional performance, intuitive and easy-to-use model and pixel-perfectness were some of the major tasks we have set for this new control.

We have separated the chart into several layers, where the core one is totally platform agnostic and is built on top of our custom logical tree. We call this layer the “View Model” of the chart.

We have a custom property store used within the charting logical tree. It is about 5 times faster than DependencyObject in look-up time and consumes about 3 times less memory.

We have an entirely custom layout and do not rely on the SL layout system to arrange our charting view models.

We have a stand-alone visualization layer that presents the chart view model. Every view model is presented by the simplest possible SL visual – e.g. Rectangle, Line, Polyline, etc. Still, every single aspect is fully customizable by specifying Data Templates or Styles.

We use Canvas – the only SL panel that does not invalidate measure automatically. When a redraw of some charting part is required, we simply update the Width, Height and Canvas.Left, Canvas.Top properties of the corresponding visual. A simple test proved that calling InvalidateMeasure of the canvas upon a change the in view model degrades performance about 10 times.

Architecture: a number of chart controls built for a specific purpose vs one monolith control (provides cleaner, simpler, and relevant API)

RadPolarChart -- hosts PolarLine, PolarArea, PolarPoint, RadarLine, RadarArea, RadarPoint series types (Radar series types are not available in BETA but will be included in the official release).

Notable features

Financial indicators (not available in BETA) -- support for about 20 most common financial indicators to complement the data visualization for all cartesian series types.

Extended DateTime support built-in in the axes' logic

DateTimeCategoricalAxis -- Specialized categorical axis that expects each data point to provide a System.DateTime structure as its value for this axis. The points are grouped by a user-defined date-time component (Year, Month, Day, etc.) and then the groups are sorted chronologically.

DateTimeContinuousAxis -- Specialized axis that expects each data point to provide a System.DateTime structure as its value for this axis. May be thought of as a timeline where the coordinate of each data point is calculated depending on the position of its associated DateTime on the timeline. The base unit (or the timeline step) of the axis is calculated depending on the smallest difference between any two dates.

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